Speaking of rules, I found myself agreeing with the remarks of the editors of the Washington Post about President Trump’s announcement that he would go ahead and build his wall anyway:
An eye-opening report by The Post’s Nick Miroff and Josh Dawsey casts a spotlight on the lengths to which Mr. Trump is willing to go to deliver on his signature 2016 campaign promise, which — despite his constant assertions to the contrary — is still almost exclusively on the drawing board. Specifically, the president, who sees his deadline in explicitly political terms — he promises that 500 miles of fencing will be built by Election Day next year — scoffs at environmental rules, contracting and procurement procedures, and property rights.
What are the niceties of established law, federal regulations or eminent domain compared with Mr. Trump’s wish to satisfy his partisans’ chants of “Finish the wall!�
In rushing the project forward, of course, there are potential pitfalls, among them the risk that officials in his administration may be legally liable. To this, Mr. Trump has breezily suggested he would grant presidential pardons to those who run afoul of the law — a suggestion subsequently dismissed by a White House official, who assured The Post it was a joke. Hilarious.
Whatever his intentions in that regard, word is out in the administration that Mr. Trump has approved a carte blanche for cutting corners on contracts and playing fast and loose with environmental impact assessments. As The Post quoted a senior official: “They don’t care how much money is spent, whether landowners’ rights are violated, whether the environment is damaged, the regs or even prudent business practices.â€
Trump’s border wall should be built, if it is built at all, according to the rules. I only caution that the editors be careful of what they wish for. They may find that the rules actually allow the president to do what he allegedly plans to do. Congress may have granted him that authority. I suspect that they have.
I would not have presidents with such uncheckable authority. Not Jimmy Carter, not Ronald Reagan, not George H. W. Bush, not Bill Clinton, not Barack Obama, and not Donald Trump. I think the rules are more important than the political party of the president or even the person of the president.
Largely in agreement. That said, I can say from experience it is hard to write rules that cover every possibility. People with bad intentions will mostly find a way to subvert and ignore rules. You need people of sound character with good ethics in charge of stuff if you want stuff done correctly over any period of time. (You can make the case that Congress doesn’t try very hard, or very competently, when it writes laws, and I will largely agree with you not that also. )
Steve
Good government is not an end state. It is in continuing approximation.
which is why I don’t vote for people of low character. Also, as Lord Action pithily observed, power corrupts; absolute power corrupts absolutely. Even people of good character inevitably become corrupt as they continue in office.
Great green gobs of greasy grimy gopher guts! These partisan hacks accuse Trump of being a scofflaw without citing one concrete example of such lawlessness.
“The U.S. Supreme Court recently ended its 2015-16 session, and the news for President Obama is not good. The “constitutional scholar†residing in the Oval Office lost more unanimous Supreme Court decisions than any president in recent history.”
https://rare.us/rare-politics/issues/obama/obama-has-faced-more-unanimous-supreme-court-smackdowns-than-any-president/
Partisan? Trump campaigned on building a wall. Longly and loudly. This as opposed to Obama’s trillion dollar raid on the treasury for his friends and PPACA, neither of which was mentioned in his campaign and not a single Republican voted for.
As the Black Messiah said, elections have consequences. The inchoate caterwauling of Trump’s critics can only mean that there is a severe shortage of Pampers.
Ways and means matter.
I believe I criticized Democrats at the time for the PPACA on such grounds. I have a vague recollection of quoting A Man For All Seasons then, too. However, a different quote:
I criticized the ARRA on somewhat different grounds: I had issues with its structure, its size, and its timing. I noticed recently that people are still lying about it. There were alternatives, the most obvious being a complete payroll tax holiday but that wouldn’t have provided the opportunity of directing graft to supporters that the ARRA did.
“PPACA, neither of which was mentioned in his campaign”
Health care reform was a leading issue in the 2008 election. Granted, the specific reform called PPACA wasn’t written yet so it could the mentioned. The ACA was largely paid for with taxes and other means. I suspect that you are thinking of the GOP passage of the Medicare Drug bill, which I believe remains the largest unfunded spending bill in our history.
Steve
It is unlikely that the Medicare Prescription Drug, Improvement, and Modernization Act of 2003 would have passed without the support of 9 Democrats in the House.